He Discarded Baggage From Bad Old Days

CARPENTER

January 21, 1992|by PAUL CARPENTER, The Morning Call

Long memories can be burdensome, even on a day set aside for remembering.

I'm old enough to remember when the good people in and around Buffalo, where I was born, kept their neighborhoods rigidly segregated. My view of the black sections was through car windows, as we hurried past, wondering how human beings could endure such wretchedness.

I can remember California during World War II, when my father was a swimming instructor at the Navy's boot camp in San Diego. When he took me to the base pool, some of the other instructors systematically played a cruel game with black recruits who couldn't swim, nearly drowning them. They thought it was hilarious. My father was sickened by it, but he didn't protest.

I remember that when I went in the service I wound up in a squadron of technicians, where the grand total of blacks was one. The food service squadron, however, consisted almost entirely of minorities -- and I never protested, either.

I remember Shreveport, La., in the 1950s, when I didn't think it was right to have separate water fountains for blacks and whites, side-by-side, but I drank from the nice new fountain without saying anything.

I remember how black men in Shreveport were expected to jump off the sidewalk if a white approached and to lower their eyes in the presence of a white woman. Failure to comply could be fatal. Now, finally, I began to protest a little.

Then came inspiration in the form of a young politician who was full of charm, intellect and vision. He promised a better America, he promised fairness, and we chose him over a graceless reactionary. The bullets that took away John Kennedy tore through the souls of us all.

A few years later, more bullets took away Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, just nine weeks apart, silencing the two voices that by 1968 best articulated those promises of a fairer America.

The souls of many of us remain scarred to this day, and I carried all that baggage with me yesterday to St. James AME Zion Church in Allentown, to observe a service for Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Rev. A. Addison Cash, pastor of the church, observed that we were gathered "to remember a stout-hearted Christian ... Though they spate the dreamer, we must keep the dream alive."

Cash certainly seemed old enough to remember, but he didn't seem to be carrying much baggage from the bad old days.

I asked him about that, and about his feelings toward Martin Luther King, when I caught up to him again last night. "We have taken out the pain of his death," Cash said. "We negate the hurt ... We're equating the dream. We're making the dream a reality."

He said King's legacy is a legacy of progress in the area of racial discrimination, and today's focus has shifted inward, to growing individual problems.

"We're troubled with the plight of the black youth," he said, referring to the drugs and other maladies that are "devastating the black community."

Yes, I said, but don't you still feel the imprints of the days of ruthless bigotry and the brutal elimination of those visionary leaders?

"Oh Lord, yes," Cash said. He had worked with King, leading a protest movement at a college in Maryland in the 1960s.

I told him about my days of revulsion in Shreveport, and then I felt a little silly when Cash said he had also lived in that city, as a young black man, long before the relatively enlightened 1950s.

Yes, he said, blacks stepped off the sidewalks and could not stare at white women. "Some black men were lynched, not for raping a white woman, but for looking at her."